Industry safety: The large numbers of foreign nationals presenting to just one Dublin hospital with eye injuries sustained while working on building sites and in allied trades has led to a call for steps to be taken to ensure these workers fully understand any safety course they are given.
Prof Louis Collum, a consultant ophthalmic surgeon at the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital and professor of ophthalmology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, urged action after a review of patients who presented to the hospital's casualty unit with occupational eye injuries over a three-month period.
A total of 100 such patients presented last September, October and November and some 54 per cent of them were foreign nationals, most of them from other EU countries such as Poland.
Prof Collum said foreign nationals were disproportionately represented among the injured. "It's way off," he said.
Furthermore, the most severe eye injuries, which included seven cases where the cornea had been perforated, occurred among foreign nationals. Only one of the seven retained full vision in his injured eye.
Five ended up with restricted vision, four of them "significantly" so and one of them ended up blind in one eye.
He added that one of the 100 patients who presented with an eye injury had previously ended up losing most vision in his other eye as a result of an accident at home in his country of origin.
Questions had to be asked as to whether it was safe to allow such persons with restricted vision to work on building sites, he said.
Prof Collum said the cost of these injuries to the patients themselves was therefore very significant as was the cost to their employer in terms of days lost from work and to the health service treating them, he said.
The most common cause of the injuries, he said, was the patients not wearing protective goggles.
Just 37 per cent of the foreign nationals, when questioned, said they were wearing eye protection at the time of their accident.
Some said they had just taken them off when the accident occurred, others said goggles were not available or were broken, at least one said the goggles were uncomfortable and a number said they did not think goggles were required for the work they were doing.
Grinding and drilling without goggles were "cardinal sins", Prof Collum said.
Meanwhile, just 66 per cent of the foreign nationals, when asked, indicated they had done a safety course. This compared with 84 per cent of injured Irish workers.
Prof Collum said the fact that some foreign nationals had poor English and might not understand safety courses, where they were given, might increase the risk of occupational eye injuries among foreign nationals in comparison to Irish workers.
He recommends adequate and effective eye protection is available in all workplaces and that the content of safety courses is translated for foreign nationals.
All of the 100 patients seen over the three months covered by this study were male and their average age was 32 years.
"Anybody that's employing these people now really should be making sure that they have been to a safety course and it's one thing for them to wave a piece of paper that they have been at it but it's another thing to establish have they understood what's been said to them on the course," Prof Collum said.
"We are not pointing the finger at anybody . . . there is responsibility right across the board . . . we are just telling it the way we see it to raise awareness really and then perhaps tightening up on some of the areas that might be lax," he said.
A follow-up study, involving a greater number of patients who presented with occupational eye injuries over a longer period, is now being completed.